The ship would make several stops in the Aleutian Islands. As far as Muir could see, the native Aleuts had been virtually ruined by their contact with “civilization,” first Russian and now American. Whalers, sealers, and representatives of the fur companies had introduced them to new vices while sapping the vitality from their old ways of doing things. “After paying old debts contracted with the Companies,” Muir wrote, the Aleuts “invest the remainder in trinkets, in clothing not so good as their own furs, and in beer, and go at once into hoggish dissipation, hair-pulling, wife-beating, etc.
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